The invention relates to methods and systems for browsing video assets such as video-on-demand videos and internet videos. In particular, it relates to techniques for enabling such browsing and viewing in a “lean-back” environment such as before a television monitor.
Traditional TV operators such as cable companies (e.g. Comcast), direct broadcast satellite companies (e.g. DirecTV), IPTV companies (e.g. ATT) and broadcasters are concerned about the explosive growth of media consumption on the Internet and are seeking ways to incorporate this content into their service offerings. One of the main differentiators of the viewing experience provided by these operators as against the Internet experience is that it is delivered to TVs for viewing in a “lean back” environment in a living room, whereas the Internet experience is typically referred to as a “lean forward” experience in front of a computer.
At the same time, new companies are delivering content “over the top” of the existing TV service, using the Internet as a delivery mechanism. These companies are referred to as Over the Top (OTT) operators. So far this content is delivered to the PC, and some extender devices are emerging to enable content downloaded or streamed in this manner to be displayed on the TV. New devices are coming which deliver content directly from the Internet to the TV, without the PC.
There are several key challenges in delivering Internet content to the TV. These include:                Internet content is generally encoded at a lower resolution (e.g. 320×240) than the TV, which might be up to 1920×1080 for High Definition (HD).        Existing TV systems use either the MPEG2 or MPEG4 AVC compression standards, whereas the Internet uses encoding such as Flash, Windows Media and QuickTime. The vast majority of deployed set-top boxes (STBs) cannot decode and display content encoded in the Internet formats.        There is a vast amount of content available on the Internet. However, there is no convenient way to search for content using a TV remote control. (For example typing search terms using a remote control is very cumbersome.)        When setting up a session to play movies on existing video-on-demand (VOD) systems, the set-top box (STB) must communicate with a session manager, which interacts with billing and subscriber management systems to ensure that the STB has the proper rights to view the content; this process can take many seconds to complete. Since many Internet clips are very short, ranging from tens of seconds to a few minutes, the delay associated with treating each of these clips as a separate asset and incurring the delay associated with session setup is annoying to users accustomed to quicker response on the Internet.        There are existing STBs deployed in tens of millions of homes, and the majority of these STBs are older models with limited capability. Deploying new client applications is very difficult and time consuming, limiting where and how quickly they can be deployed        
An opportunity arises to provide mechanisms and techniques that enable better and more usable delivery of Internet content to the TV, in spite of the difficulties described above.